Pop-Up Café On Ice

It’s cold here in Western Europe, very cold. In the Netherlands there’s only one thing that counts these days: will the legendary Elfstedentocht (‘Eleven Cities Tour’) be held? René Boer sent us this photo of a pretty ‘cool’ intervention in the city of Leiden, where a clever entrepreneur has taken advantage of the frozen canal in front of his café that has become a new layer of public space. If this ain’t pop-up…

This weekend, Netherlands’s hottest new generation in e-culture, the HOT100, are coming to The Hague. They will be buzzing around at TodaysArt, a festival about new media and urban regeneration. Boasting already with an overwhelmingly rich program the HOT100, which were selected by The New Institute last month, will find themselves in aww once they see their venue. The outer shell of the events will be no less but the giant empty building of the former Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations.

The Wibautstraat is a modern four track road that ends in the center of Amsterdam. For years this street was considered to be the most ugly street of Amsterdam. Indeed it’s badly maintained and traffic runs 24/7 here. But it’s definitely not fair to call this street the most ugly one in Amsterdam. In fact it’s a ‘potential lane’, expressed by the sudden emergence of temporary clubs and bars such as Trouw and Canvas. Even the New York Times spent an article on it, claiming that the Wibautstraat is “emerging as a center of hip in this city, splashed in disappearing newsprint”.

Billboards are omnipresent in the contemporary city. Some of them are almost as big as small apartments. This must have inspired the Belgian artist Karl Philips to start his project ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, in which he transforms urban billboards into small parasite apartments for urbanites.

Japanese fashion company Uniqlo has made this online calendar about the moving city. The time lapse movies show the city as an organism and give a good insight in the relation between moving and static bits of the city. Uniqlo made the calender available for intergration in a blog, a MySpace or a Facebook account,…